1970: planet Earth takes center stage: anger at the nation's increasingly polluted air and water helped fuel an environmental movement and efforts to protect America's natural resources.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: TIMES PAST

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Back in the 1960s, the oily, brown water of Cleveland's Cuyahoga River was so toxic land filled with garbage, residents joked that if anyone fell in, they wouldn't drown, they'd decay.

So it wasn't a total surprise to locals when the Cuyahoga River caught fire in June 1969 after some oil-soaked debris was ignited, most likely by sparks from a passing train. But to the rest of the nation, the idea of a flaming fiver was shocking.

Six months, earlier, a thick oil slick had washed over the beaches of Santa Barbara, California. The disaster, which went on to blacken 40 miles of scenic coastline, was the result of a blowout on an offshore oil rig.

"The Cuyahoga River fire, in combination with the Santa Barbara oil spill, had a very powerful motivating force on the environmental movement," says Jonathan Adler, an environmental historian at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

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So powerful, in fact, that 1970 became the year the environmental movement really took off and began to have an impact on our national policy and our daily lives. Forty years later, we're still reaping the benefits--and facing new challenges.

The Tumultuous '60s

The 1960s were a decade of protests and social movements that changed America, including the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement (against the Vietnam War), and the women's movement. It was in this social and political context that the environmental movement developed.

It wasn't just high-profile environmental disasters like the Santa Barbara oil spill and the Cuyahoga River fire that got people angry and spurred them to act. On the coasts, beaches were often closed because of the raw sewage being dumped into the oceans. And across the country, it was common for factories to dump their waste directly into rivers: In western Massachusetts, people remember the Housatonic River changing color from one day to the next, depending on what color paper the Crane mills were making.

Dense smog hung over the nation's cities. In Los Angeles, some businessmen changed their shirts during the day because the soot in the air had soiled them by lunchtime. In New York, the air was sometimes so dirty that tourists couldn't see the city below from the Empire State Building's observation deck.

No one really thought much about pollution back then. The U.S. was still in the midst of the post-World War II boom: Factories across the country produced everything from cars to washing machines. And as millions of people moved to the suburbs, car sales--and the pollution they produced--soared.

"There was no consciousness of the environment at all in the 1950s and '60s--nobody even knew what the word 'ecology' was," says Rich Borden, an environmental studies professor at College of the Atlantic in Maine.

"At that time, smoke coming out of smokestacks was seen as a sign of progress. A few years later, it was seen as something we had to regulate and be careful of."

That change began in 1970. On April 22, nearly 20 million people, many of them young, participated in rallies and teach-ins around the country to celebrate the first Earth Day. The event was intended to alert the public to the environment's poor condition and encourage Americans to get involved in fixing it. It remains, to this day, one...